


The Devil Won't Let Me Be

by willowoftheriver



Series: a palace within my dreams [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones (TV), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - A Song of Ice and Fire, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Ambition, Crossover, Drug Dealing, F/M, Female Jesse Pinkman, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I Don't Even Know, I'm Sorry, POV Outsider, Period-Typical Sexism, Scheming, What Have I Done, What Was I Thinking?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-06 03:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5400365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Will works toward an invasion on the other side of the world, forces begin aligning much closer to the Iron Throne.</p><p>(walter white doesn't plan to let anyone forget his name)</p><p> </p><p>Companion/side story to 'Iron In My Spine'</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Devil Won't Let Me Be

**Author's Note:**

> I feel the deep need to explain this as much as it's even able to be explained. So . . . I guess it started when my mom and I finally got Better Call Saul on DVD (we don't have cable, I know, we're lame) and that reignited my massive Breaking Bad love from a few years ago. That led back to the Brba kink meme which had a sadly unfilled prompt on it for Jesse and Will Graham having a chat about their respective asshole boyfriends.
> 
> That, in turn, got me mentally comparing and contrasting the Walter/Jesse and Hannibal/Will relationships. Then on tumblr I saw a photoshop of Walt in the Iron Throne. And then we watched Wolf Hall. Then I thought about how in my already painfully insane Will as Daenerys fic I had really wanted to include a possibly-a-secret-royal character like that certain one on Game of Thrones (R+L=J, amirite?) but had to leave it out because there was no one to use for it.
> 
> And so, eventually, this just happened. If you want to understand the vague mentions of the Hannibal characters made, you should read 'Iron In My Spine' first, as it sets up more of what's going on in King's Landing.

Meeting with Walter White is never a pleasure, even by the standards of Saul’s business. Oh, by now he’s used to the festering ambition and underhanded scheming of the Court of the Iron Throne, the nobles and all their little, all-important Houses—if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be where he is. It’s really not that hard to grasp, after all, because people are all the same, no matter where you are. Once upon a time he talked the kindly citizens of his nowhere village into giving him gold for his poor broken limbs that were broken thanks to them— _and now how was he supposed to go make an honest living to support his ten children/ailing prostitute sister/crippled mother/Rebellion-veteran father when he couldn’t use his leg?—_ and though times and places and circumstances have changed, he still applies all the same skills to the business the nobles don’t want anyone else to know about.

When the King wants something done legally—a title bestowed, or land granted, or an execution order issued—he’ll go to Hamlin. Back when mad Aeryn Graham was still on the Throne, Charles McGill used to be the automatic go-to, but maybe some of that madness was contagious, like a bad cold or a whore’s itch. Old Chuck lost his mind as surely as any Graham, or so the whispers go, and with him shut away in his house they’re left at the mercy of a walking, over-tanned mannequin with unnaturally white teeth, piss-dyed hair, and a _Hamlindigo blue_ surcoat. (Saul dearly wishes he could say he was kidding about that last bit, but he isn’t. Oh, how he isn’t.)

Of course, there are two sides to the law. Operating inside of it might be the more comfortable option, nice and serene and safe, but once you venture out into the scary realm beyond it, there are just so many _possibilities_. When the King, or anyone else, finds himself _intrigued_ by one of those possibilities—well, then he comes to Saul.

Saul doesn’t have a House of his own. He’s a nobody, from nowhere, with no personal stake in all the petty infighting and rivalries between this or that family. No one remembers Jimmy McGill, with his shabby clothes and his desperation to be good, to be noticed, to be _anything_.

Saul’s office sits in a squalid little building tucked away in the center of King’s Landing, off a series of alleys right at the point where the merchant district bleeds into Flea Bottom. There’s a brothel next door and a blacksmith and butcher across the way, and the street in front always runs thick with black water and animal blood and human filth thrown out of the windows above.

Saul knows that his building is gaudy. Outlandishly tasteless, really. Back when Jimmy had an office in the back of a whorehouse that he was too ashamed to ever bring clients to, he would’ve objected to this place just as much, because it didn’t mesh with the vision he had of the law, of professionalism. But then a time came when he decided that maybe that wasn’t his own vision at all, just his brother’s, and that no matter what he did, they were never going to be anything alike.

Saul _likes_ gaudy. It amuses him. He has the fur of rare dead animals on his floor and jewels in places they have no business being, pure gold accents and pillars all around his desk that he thinks gives him a real presence with his clients.

Not Walter, though. Ever since the man first came here he’s always had all the power in the room, even if Saul didn’t notice it at first. He wishes now that he had.

Just a few years ago, being from House White was arguably worse than even being from a peasant family native to the ass end of nowhere. Out there, no one had much of anything and so what was there to be embarrassed about in that? But here, with other Houses circling like vultures for any opportunity at advancement, the taste of your own insignificance was very, _very_ bitter.

House White wasn’t always nothing. Maybe that was a detail that made it even harder to swallow. The history books will tell you that back a few hundred years ago, Hartwell I was a force to be reckoned with, someone who the King listened to and whose enemies’ bloated bodies wound up floating in Blackwater Bay.

But that was then, and as any Graham or Verger would be happy to tell you, position is a perilous thing to maintain. These days, House White was really just nobility in name only, the lowest of the low, bannermen to a bannerman’s bannerman. No wealth, no hall, and a dullard heir who could barely even walk.

As for the patriarch, Walter I is a dead man walking. On a good day he coughs up enough blood to soak through a handkerchief, and on a bad one he’s more than capable of coughing himself into unconsciousness. Recently the Maesters have been feeding him potions that make him vomit and his hair fall out, and Saul is at a loss to explain why they think that’ll help. He hopes it won’t.

Oh, it’s not that Walt’s not profitable. Saul’s made more gold in their yearlong partnership than he had in his entire preceding career, and he would be more than happy to go on in this stead indefinitely. He would say the man was making up blue gold in that alchemy laboratory of his, if those crystals weren’t worth far more.

The problem is, Walter has become extremely . . . _ambitious_ as of late. That vicious resentment of the other Houses has always been apparent, however much he tries to play it off. The Schwartzes have risen from similar circumstances in every way the Whites haven’t and the Hand of the King is a scheming nobody from Essos and even Hank Schrader is a Knight, out and bringing glory to his family name. Yet House White stays where it is, low and laughable and _nothing_.

He claimed that had nothing to do with his motivation in the beginning, of course. It was all _altruism_ on his part, a last act of a dying man so his family could have the gold to survive after he was gone.

That was before Boeticcher, before he tricked Fring and House Salamanca into destroying each other and sidled, with all the put-upon humility he could muster, into a higher position than his family had ever even begun to claw the bottom of.

Now every day Walter White sits in his glory in the hall of a king, staring at a throne. Counting swords. Scheming.

Saul knows he does. He’s heard the proof from the man’s own mouth.

It was only a little while ago, during the divorce and the blow up with Beneke. It was becoming a bigger issue than Saul had originally anticipated because really, was _House Lambert_ going to put up a fight? They didn’t have the resources to pay off the Septons. But Skyler was proving to be unexpectedly resourceful, making her moves with all the guile of a true noblewoman. Beneke was her one mistake, the one Saul was thoroughly exploiting, but getting the idiot to sign testimony about the affair was apparently beyond Huell and Kuby’s capabilities. So when they’d called him out of his office to frantically discuss broken necks and acts of the gods, he’d left his clients all by their lonesome selves for a while. Always a risky thing with those two. He hasn’t seen so much dysfunction in one place since House Kettleman went extinct seven years ago.

Lady Jessica—or _Jesse_ , as she made a habit of insisting—has been here since day one. A fifty-fifty partner in the blue, though purely from a business standpoint, Saul thinks that’s a waste. Walter’s outgrown any need for her in that regard.

That’s not to say Saul doesn’t like the kid in a vague, passing sort of way. He says _kid_ —she’s a spinster, really, six and twenty by now, thrown out of her father’s hall when she was a more properly marriageable age after rumors started persisting that she was of, shall we say, extremely uncertain virtue.

Jesse of House Pinkman has been well acquainted with rumors for a long time. When Jimmy McGill first came to King’s Landing, she was a towheaded child growing into a woman people were calling _the most beautiful in the world_ , because they just can’t resist handing that title out to someone. With that came the talk of royal bastardy, her being one of the beautiful Grahams in disguise. Her lady mother was morally outraged, of course, because her blood was bluer than a godsdamned river and that meant she was automatically above such things. But she still slanted her eyes and twitched her lips just enough while denying it to ensure the whispers didn’t die.

Until the War. Then she locked down everything as tightly as she could and pretended it had never been an issue at all.

Jesse served as one of Queen Margot’s handmaidens for a while, but once Freddie came, she found no favor there. Apparently the new Queen thought that having gigantic red hair meant no one was more beautiful than she was, and so Jesse became nothing more than a disgraced girl alone in her dead lady aunt’s big, empty manse.

Walter used to be her tutor, or the tutor of that dead-eyed little brother of hers, or something along those lines. Saul supposes that’s why she still only ever calls him _Lord White_ , even when they’re going for each other’s throats. (He’s sure Walter just loves it.)

“I have— _we_ have come too far,” Walter is saying when Saul gets back in range of his door, Huell and Kuby sent back off, this time to the Maester’s chambers. “The _world_ is at our fingertips, and you want to—”

“We’re _drug dealers_ , Lord White,” says Jesse in that affected commoner’s accent of hers. There’s been a trend of noble brats thinking it makes them sound edgy or something. “We’ve gone as far as we can go. Fucking farther. We have all the money in the godsdamned world—”

“When you’re not throwing it out of windows,” he grinds out.

“I never had to kill _anyone_ before I hooked up with your old ass! I was—”

“You were what? What? Rotting away day after day, chasing the dragon whenever you weren’t grinding out a living with that shit you used to make or whoring around with whatever man glanced your way? Marking time in your useless, pointless existence? No, Jesse, no. Before me, you were _nothing_. And you’d be back to nothing again if you left!”

“Fuck you!” she screams, voice a touch thick.

Saul risks a glance through the jarred door and sees Walter grabbing her from behind, winding his arms around her front and holding tight until she stops struggling. She’s a small woman, with thin bones underneath that whorish dress and layered on jewelry.

He rests his chin on the crown of her head and speaks softly. “I’m not in the drug business, Jesse. I’m in the empire business. Together, we’re going to go all the way to the top. I’m going to put you above every woman in the kingdoms. I’m going to make you Queen.”

Jesse closes her eyes tightly and Saul knows that fear on her face. He’s felt it for a while now.

No one has been pleased with Abel Gideon’s reign. He’s Aeryn Graham all over again and that same tension is building, waiting patiently for the day it can finally boil over. Then the nobles will all come out to play their Game, the one that you can never stop once you’re in. It has no half finishes, just one of two immutable, inevitable outcomes for every player.

Jesse will play because a missing maidenhead doesn’t compare to the potential of healthy heirs or ties to the wealth and reputation of House Pinkman, or even the rumor of royal blood in her veins.

And Saul will play because he doesn’t have a choice anymore. He made a deal with a monster he thought he could control, only now he realizes he can’t. No one can.

None of them will be done until Walter says they are. And he never will.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally tried to write this from Walt's point of view but it just would nOOoOot cooperate.
> 
> Please forgive the reference to Walter Junior/Flynn. I imagine that in a setting like Westeros he'd be viewed and treated a lot like Tyrion.
> 
> Will's dad's name is of course taken from Daenerys's, but I changed it slightly so it would look like a fantasy'd up spelling of 'Aaron.'
> 
> The title comes from the song 'Sinister Kid' by The Black Keys.
> 
> I apologize for everything.
> 
> -Annastasia


End file.
